Tibetan Buddhist Monks creating a 'sand mandala' of the Buddha of Compassion. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

What is a good life? A Buddhist humanism would have to answer the question in terms of a trajectory of consciousness towards awakening and compassion. It would offer a diagnosis of injustice as a product of bondage to a grasping consciousness and provide a therapy of emancipation which reflected an understanding of the human condition which gives content and direction to the idea of compassion.

This picture of the progressive self-knowledge of the species admits an idea of transcendence that is simply the possibility of action that "goes beyond" the limited perspective of self-enclosure. We are rarely wholly engulfed by or absorbed in this self-enclosure, but rather suffer it as a reduction of sensibility and loss of perspective.

Now the picture of secular humanism offered by the philosopher Richard Norman is not simply a matter of the rejection of religious belief but is also "the affirmation that human beings can find from within themselves the resources to live a good life without religion".

A Buddhist humanism would qualify this: we do not know in advance what these resources are. Only through trying to live well and confronting the obstacles to this venture do we discover the inner resources we need. Their emergence may, however, lead to a misapprehension or perspectival illusion, even within Buddhism. Thus, in the Japanese traditions a distinction is made between jiriki or self-power and tariki or other-power. This distinction is partly a matter of how the struggle to overcome the destructive passions and achieve perspective is experienced when it is conceived as the struggle of the will, one which ends in exhaustion. By contrast, release may appear to be granted by a benign force outside of oneself.

But what is discovered is the limited scope of the will in the transformation of consciousness. Understanding dawns: it is not something that is under the control of the will but something that drives its direction.

Christian thinkers have been reluctant to go along with the humanist idea that "human beings can find from within themselves the resources to live a good life without religion" and I wonder whether this reluctance has to do with a false assumption about the role of the will in humanist accounts of morality.

When he was asked in a New Statesman interview whether we "can make sense of morality without a religious notion of a transcendent or supernatural being", Rowan Williams said that it seemed to him that "it is not finally feasible to try to ground unconditional rights or the intrinsic dignity of human beings independently of the idea of a transcendent ground of value". He went on to say: "People do, of course, make such claims, and do so in good faith, but I don't see how you can define a universally shared … conception of human flourishing without something more than a pragmatic or immanent basis. In other words, I think morality ultimately needs a notion of the sacred – and for the Christian that means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love."

Williams is right to say that the idea of unconditional human rights cannot be grounded in pragmatism since the idea of unconditionality belongs to a moral vision which sees in its own light the limits of pragmatism and its shifting needs.

But this understanding of all human beings as the objects of an unconditional love seems to be an achieved understanding, one whose possibility we may be awakened to by inhabiting, however briefly and imperfectly, the all-embracing attitude or perspective from which that understanding derives. This understanding is given expression, for instance, in the figure of the Bodhisattva who sheds tears of compassion as they contemplate the causes and conditions of human wretchedness.

Theologians like Williams appear to use the term "immanentism" to mean the denial of the possibility or need for a transcendental grounding for morality. The denial is then taken to imply, by contrast, that morality is grounded in the very changeable human will. Humanism is frequently represented in these terms and refuting the charge is a necessary task for humanist thinkers, a task which would take the form of insisting that what is primary is not the will but the understanding.

Buddhism offers a version of this primacy of the understanding: our conception of humanity is not inert but drives the will and motivates action. Williams says that morality needs a notion of the sacred. Whether we should talk of the "sacred" depends on what it is taken to commit us to, but the understanding of human beings as objects of unconditional love, as objects of compassion, derives from a perspective we sometimes gain and often lose, but which remains revered as a haunting measure of our conduct in our poetry and literature.